Digital & UX

Digital and UX is the work of turning brand strategy into the websites, apps, and digital experiences customers actually encounter. It’s the discipline where every design decision meets a measurable outcome, where every strategic assumption gets tested against user behavior within days of launch, and where the gap between what a brand says about itself and what its digital presence proves is either closed or exposed. This page is where we collect STIR’s thinking on digital and UX: how we define it, how we approach it, the questions clients ask us most often, and the work we’ve done that proves the case.

What we believe about digital and UX

Strategy that can’t be executed is theatre. Execution that isn’t integrated is noise. We do the work that proves it.

That conviction shapes how we approach every discipline at STIR — but it shows up most directly in digital and UX, because digital is where strategy gets graded. Conversion data comes back every week and doesn’t care about the strategy deck.

Most digital and UX work fails for one of two reasons. Either it’s been disconnected from the strategy that should be guiding it — a beautiful website that doesn’t know what business outcome it’s supposed to produce — or it’s been optimized so aggressively against short-term metrics that the brand experience has been sacrificed to the funnel. The result in both cases is digital that looks fine in the case study and underperforms against what the business actually needs.

We believe digital and UX has to do real work, and the work has to be honest about measurement. That means agreeing — before design begins — what business outcome the digital experience is supposed to influence, and building the analytics to know whether it’s happening. It means treating the website as a system that improves with operation rather than a project that completes at launch. And it means being willing to change our own recommendations when the data comes back and tells us we were wrong.

It’s also the reason we don’t separate digital and UX from the brand, creative, and media work that surrounds it. The shops that do — pure-play digital agencies and pure-play UX consultancies, in particular — produce work that’s frequently competent and almost never coherent with the rest of the brand. Great website, off-brand copy. Elegant interface, disconnected from the campaign. The digital wins on its own terms and fails on the business’s. We’d rather build digital that’s slightly less pristine in the portfolio and substantially more useful to the business.

How we approach digital and UX

Every digital and UX engagement at STIR moves through four phases. The phases overlap more than they sequence — digital isn’t a linear process, and treating it as one produces linear results.

1. Discovery

We start by understanding what the digital experience is actually trying to do — which business outcomes matter, which audiences we’re designing for, and what’s currently working or broken. That means analytics review, user research where the budget supports it, competitive audits, and honest conversations with the sales and support teams who hear what customers actually say. The deliverable from this phase is a shared understanding of the problem worth solving, not a list of features to build.

2. Design

With discovery in hand, we design the experience — information architecture, user flows, interface design, content structure. Design decisions get made explicitly, with trade-offs surfaced rather than hidden. The deliverable here is design that a developer can build and a stakeholder can defend, not a portfolio piece for the design team.

3. Build

Build is where the design meets reality. Technical performance, accessibility compliance, analytics implementation, integration with the rest of the marketing stack — all of it gets built with the same care as the front-end design. The site that ships is the one that will be judged; skipping the technical rigour at this stage produces experiences that look great and perform badly. We don’t do that.

4. Measure and iterate

Launch is the start of the work, not the end. Analytics tell us whether the experience is producing the outcomes we designed for. Where it isn’t, we iterate — refining copy, restructuring flows, testing alternatives. Digital engagements that skip this phase get progressively less useful over time as the site drifts from what the business actually needs. The ones that don’t skip it compound in value.

Common questions about digital and UX

How long does a website project take?

Highly variable. A focused landing page or campaign microsite can come together in 4 to 6 weeks. A full corporate website redesign typically runs 12 to 20 weeks from discovery through launch. Complex builds – e-commerce, multi-brand architecture, deep integrations with CRM or marketing automation – can run six months or more. The biggest variables are usually the scope of content work (which often outlasts the design work) and the number of stakeholders whose input needs incorporating. Website speed is mostly a function of decision-making speed.

How much does a website cost?

Website engagements at STIR range from the low tens of thousands for focused work (a landing page system, a targeted redesign) to several hundred thousand for full corporate sites with significant back-end integration, custom functionality, or multi-brand architecture. The variables are usually the scope of custom development, the depth of content work, and the complexity of the marketing stack we’re connecting to. We’re happy to scope to a budget if you have one, and we’ll be honest about what’s achievable inside it.

Do you do digital and UX work without the brand or creative work?

Sometimes, with caveats. If the brand strategy and creative direction exist and are clear, we can absolutely come in for the digital work alone. If they don’t, the digital work will surface the gaps quickly — and expensively. A website is a strategic document as much as a technical one; asking a digital team to build without a clear brand foundation usually produces a site that doesn’t quite know what it’s for. The most useful first conversation is often whether the foundation exists or whether we need to firm it up before starting.

What about AI and search — how does that change things?

Substantially, and in ways most sites haven’t caught up with. Three things are worth knowing. First, traditional search behavior is shifting — a growing share of searches now end without a click, as AI-generated answers, featured snippets, and chat-based tools provide information directly. Second, this means the content on your site increasingly needs to be structured to be extracted by AI tools rather than just crawled by search engines — clear definitions, scannable structure, schema markup, credible attribution. Third, the brands that will win in this environment aren’t necessarily the ones with the biggest sites; they’re the ones with the most citeable, well-structured, authoritative content on the topics they want to own. Digital and UX work in 2026 has to account for this from the start.

What platforms do you build on?

Depends on the project. For most content-driven and marketing-led sites, WordPress remains the sensible choice — mature, flexible, and workable by teams without deep technical resources. For e-commerce, Shopify handles most mid-market needs well; larger or more custom operations warrant something more bespoke. For product-focused organisations with heavy custom application requirements, we build on modern JavaScript frameworks like Next.js or Nuxt. We’re platform-agnostic in the sense that we recommend what fits the client’s needs, resources, and long-term maintenance realities — not what’s currently fashionable.

How do you measure whether digital work is working?

Against the business outcomes agreed before the work started. For lead-gen sites, that’s qualified leads, form completion rates, and downstream sales-cycle metrics. For e-commerce, it’s conversion rate, average order value, and lifetime value. For content-led sites, it’s organic traffic, engagement depth, and increasingly, presence in AI-generated answers. We set up analytics infrastructure that connects to what the business cares about, then we report against that — not against whatever the platform happens to surface by default.

What about accessibility and compliance?

Baseline accessibility (WCAG 2.1 AA) is built into every site we develop — not as an add-on but as a design and build discipline throughout. For regulated industries and larger public-facing organisations, deeper accessibility work (formal audits, VPATs, ongoing compliance monitoring) can be scoped alongside the main engagement. Compliance-adjacent topics — cookie consent, privacy notices, data collection practices — get the same treatment. Getting these things right is meaningfully cheaper than fixing them after a complaint or an audit.

Recent thinking on digital and UX

The latest STIR perspectives on websites, conversion, AI visibility, and the strategic work behind digital experiences that earn their keep.

Digital and UX in practice

Three engagements where digital thinking produced commercial outcomes. Full case studies linked below.

Who you’ll work with

Digital and UX at STIR is led by Neil Fraser, working closely with the strategy, creative, and account teams from discovery through launch and beyond.